Twenty Eight Years
by rhhgrt
Summary: Brief glimpses into the relationship between Charlie Weasley and Nymphadora Tonks, a relationship left off the pages. Oneshot.


**Twenty-Eight Years**

We were eight and at the funeral of my two uncles. Mum was sobbing into dad's shoulder, and my older brother was staring desolately at the ground. My younger siblings had stayed with my grandparents—mum and dad didn't think that they were old enough to attend a funeral.

She was standing with her parents looking confused, as if she didn't understand why the two of them were dead. Her father was staring into the distance with his hands on her shoulders. Her mother was holding Auntie Marlene as she cried, her face almost painfully blank, as if she was afraid of her grief.

Uncle Gideon used to make jokes over dinner joke about how we called her Auntie Marlene even though she and Uncle Fabian had never married. It had never seemed odd to me although I knew that they had been together nearly as long as my parents had.

I let my thoughts drift as the man giving the eulogy went on and on about heroism, and bravery. What the man was saying didn't make sense. None of it made sense. Uncle Gideon and Fabian being cold, and dead, and not cracking jokes that made mum's face turn bright red just didn't make sense.

I still didn't understand it three months later when it was Auntie Marlene's turn to be buried. This time Mrs. Tonks buried her face in Mr. Tonks' shoulder, and Dora and I held hands, neither of us fully understanding why we had to lose her as well.

We were eleven years old and at King's Cross. Mum, Dad, Bill, and I stood with her and her parents. Mrs. Tonks was hugging her tightly while lecturing her on behavior and class work. She rolled her eyes while Mr. Tonks tried not to laugh.

I sympathized, for at that moment, my mum was doing the exact same thing.

"Bill, I want you to look after your brother and make sure that he keeps out of trouble and keeps up with his work."

"Sounds good mum," said Bill, cool as always; he never seemed to be irritated by anything mum did.

"Yes, Bill, look after Dora as well, I don't want her getting into trouble," said Mrs. Tonks.

Dora looked disgusted, pulled out of her mothers arms, and turned her hair bright green.

"I'll be fine mum," she said, rolling her eyes yet again.

I could tell that Mrs. Tonks was about to protest the color of her daughter's hair, but at that moment the train pulled up. The three of us somehow managed to extricate ourselves from our parents and get ourselves and our trunks onto the train in less than ten minutes. I was very pleased with myself.

I was upset when we were sorted into separate houses; I into Gryffindor and she into Hufflepuff. Fortunately, this didn't have much of an effect on our friendship, and we were still able to see each other daily.

We were fourteen and in Potions class. Snape had just taken twenty points from Hufflepuff because Dora had tripped over her own feet while walking up to his desk to submit her day's work. Unfortunately, this trip caused her to fall directly into his desk, nearly smashing the five or so flasks of student samples already sitting there.

She huffily returned to her seat, making no attempt to hide the glare she was directing at Snape. After five minutes of this, it seemed that Snape could no longer ignore her.

"Is there a problem Ms. Tonks?" he asked her in a silky, dangerous voice "Besides your apparent inability to stand up without destroying everything around you, that is."

She glared for a moment longer, and then hitched a suspiciously sweet smile onto her face.

"Oh, nothing's wrong, Professor," she said in a voice which matched the smile, "I was just wondering, do you ever see anyone?"

"_See_ anyone? I fail to understand your meaning Ms. Tonks."

"What I mean is that you seem to have a lot of anger-related issues. You might want to see someone about that," she said in a low, exceedingly earnest voice.

The entire class burst out laughing, and needless to say, Dora got a week's worth of detentions and an owl home. She later told me that the punishments had been totally worth it.

We were sixteen and discussing women. It may have been odd for most girls to discuss other girls with their male friends, but Dora never seemed to be the least bit freaked out by it.

"If I were you, I would totally go for Mary Puckle over Alexandra Matthews," she said wisely as she popped a chocolate frog into her mouth.

"Why? Puckle and Matthews are very nearly the same person."

"Yeah, but Puckle's tits are way bigger than Matthews'," she said in a voice which clearly indicated that I was an idiot to have had to have this clarified.

She scowled down at her own chest.

"Wish I could say the same for myself," she sighed, turning her hair from a short lime green to a deep, curly auburn.

"Yours are fine Dora," I said, peering rather closely at the area in question.

She smacked my arm.

"You can be such a pig, Charlie."

"Yeah, says the girl who makes my dating decisions based on the measurements of others; besides, if you don't think that yours are large enough you can just grow them can't you?-I mean, you are a metamorphagus."

"I tried that once and I nearly fell over. Mum advised me not to attempt to grow them again, as it may mess up my hormones or something, so I'm stuck with these."

She sighed tragically and flopped down onto the ground. I laughed and followed suit.

We were eighteen and hung over. I was in Dora's bedroom, and I had no idea what I was doing there or how I had gotten there. The last thing I could remember was chugging down firewhiskey at Louis Mallory's graduation party, with Dora and everyone else cheering me on as they did the same.

I realized that not only was I in Dora's room, but I was also in her bed. To make matters worse, she was in bed next to me. I also didn't seem to be wearing anything.

"Dora! Dora!" I yelled as I shook her awake.

"Charlie?" she looked as disoriented and confused as I felt. "What are you doing here?" She took note of her surroundings. "Why am I not wearing anything?"

"I was wondering the same thing myself," I told her.

We looked at each other, and I could see an expression of mingling shock and horror creeping across her features. I could tell that she was thinking the same thing as I was.

"Oh my god," she said, "we didn't…last night, did we?"

"I hope not."

"Close your eyes Charlie."

I complied. I felt her get out of bed. After a moment I heard her groan.

"What? What's wrong? Can I open my eyes?"

"Erm, yeah, you can open them."

She had donned an over-large Holyhead Harpies shirt and was staring down at the sheets in horror. I followed her gaze, and felt my eyes open in the same horror as they settled upon a suspicious red blotch on the mattress wear she had been laying.

"Well," I said after a long uncomfortable pause, "apparently some time last night we—"

"—had a drunken shag in my bed," she finished.

Neither of us knew what to say. I asked her to close her eyes so I could get dressed. She did so willingly. Once we were both dressed, and once the offending red splotch had been removed from the sheets, we looked at each other awkwardly and let the silence spiral on until she cleared her throat nervously.

"Well, if I had to lose my virginity in a bout of drunken shagging at least it was with you and not some random creepy guy."

"Yeah," I agreed, relieved that she wasn't angry, or upset with me "that's always a good thing."

"Yeah," she said, still looking exceedingly uncomfortable. "So…"

"So?" I replied, waiting for her to continue.

"Look, Charlie, erm, I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but you're not my type. Can we just chalk this up to a bad night and keep it between ourselves?"

I laughed happily and hugged her tightly.

"I'm so glad you said that. Yeah, what happened last night?-that information does not leave this room. Ever."

She grinned, and held out her hand so we could shake on it.

A month later I left for Romania. We vowed to write at least twice a week, but I knew that it wouldn't be the same.

We were twenty-two and overjoyed to see each other. I was home to see the Quidditch World Cup with my family, and went by to see her the day after I got back.

"Charlie!" she squealed as I appeared on her doorstep in late June. She hugged me so tightly that mum would have been proud and busy taking notes. I hugged her back; this was the first time I had really seen her in four years.

Once she had decided that we had hugged long enough, she dragged me inside and interrogated me about my life. How were the dragons? Did I have a girlfriend? What's her name? Tell me about your mates? And so on, and so forth.

"Dora, I told you all that in my letters."

"Yes," she said "but it's not the same as hearing about them in person."

We spent hours and hours just talking and catching up on each other's lives. It was almost as if no time had passed between us since our Hogwarts days. We had lost track and grown apart from so many of our school friends, but her and I, we were as close as ever.

When her mother walked in I once again forced to recount the last four years in great detail, and then again when her father walked in.

I was pleasantly surprised in mid-October when I was asked if I would like to assist with the First Task of the Triwizard Tournament. That meant extra time at home with Dora and my family.

Between the World Cup, and the Triwizard Tournament, Dora and I ended up spending more time together than we had in years; that was one of the happiest times in my life up to that point.

We were twenty-five, and she had changed. She was married, on edge, and seemed emotionally unstable.

I was shocked when I learned of her marriage, even more shocked when I learned that it was to my little brother's former Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, who also happened to be fifteen years our senior.

I was rather upset that she hadn't thought to invite me to the ceremony, despite her insistences that it had been an impromptu, rushed affair.

I was home for Bill's wedding. After Ministry fell that day, I thought that I would never return to Romania; my life was here now, with my family. I needed to stay home and fight in a war which became bleaker and more hopeless with each passing day.

Despite that fact that we were both home and in the midst of the same catastrophe, I believe that I saw her three times at the most, and when I did it wasn't the same. Something had changed between us; some of her bubbliness, some of the cheer that seemed synonymous with who she was seemed to be gone, and I wanted it back more than she ever could have known.

She was pregnant, and she was soon unable to fight for fear of damaging the pregnancy. I would have liked to visit her, but it was too dangerous for known members of the Order to be out in the open.

I knew in March that she had had a son, and wrote her (and Remus) a letter of congratulations. It felt strange to be writing her a letter when I wanted to just Apparate over and congratulate her in person.

It occurred to me that if I Apparated over to see her, it was possible that nothing bad would happen, but I didn't; I simply sent the owl and went to bed.

I was 26 and she was gone. All that was left of her was her devastated mother and a three month old baby. She was just gone, just…gone. She was gone, and nothing could bring her back.

I didn't want to listen to the eulogy; I didn't want to see the grief on what I knew would be Andromeda's tearless face. I did not want to look at the little boy who would never know his parents.

I wished, hoped, that none of this was real, that I would wake up and be a carefree sixteen year old again. But this was no dream.

There were a lot of people there; Andromeda had decided to bury Sirius, Remus, Ted, and Dora together.

I saw the same faces sobbing now that I had seen so many years ago at the funerals of my long-dead uncles and the woman one of them had loved. I remembered how their deaths hadn't made sense to me, how they didn't seem real.

It may be that wisdom comes with age, but as I stared at the tombstones, it made even less sense to me than it had when I was eight. I still didn't understand why they were dead, why she was dead, and I probably never would.

I was twenty-eight and in love, but not with a human. I had finally managed to pick up my life, pick myself up out of my grief, and return to Romania. The terrain was still lonely and windswept. My mates were still there, laughing as always, and the dragons were still there in all of their wild beauty. This was where I belonged. I knew that now.


End file.
